Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader's Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line (3 page)

Chapter Three

The Power of a Secret

Never trust a decision you don’t want your mother to know about. How’s that for a brilliant insight? These days I can laugh at how obviously true that’s been in my life. But the road that finally led me to this wisdom is paved with regret, pain, brokenness, shame, and even blood on my hands.

But I never saw it coming. There was much I didn’t see.

I left campus the day of the volunteer fair as a proud champion of women in crisis, their protector against would-be controllers who wanted to rob them of the right to safe medical services and deny them access to education on how to manage their reproductive decisions. I would be their guardian against back-alley butchers; sexually transmitted diseases; unknown cancers lurking in their bodies, undetected for lack of annual exams; and insult-throwing agitators who wanted to humiliate and shame them.

So why didn’t I call Mom and tell her my good news?

Mom and Dad lived in Rockdale, about forty-five minutes from Texas A&M. For the most part, I’d had a great relationship with them and considered myself lucky to have such a close family. Until I left for college, we had always attended church together. I’d been active in church youth group, had been a camp counselor, and always had been a good student—an overachiever in many ways. I’d been vice president of student council, a yearbook editor, active in choir and drama, on the dance team, a member of Business Professionals of America and the Texas Association of Future Educators, and in the top 10 percent of my class. I loved being involved with people and was particularly drawn to leadership opportunities. My parents had always told me they were proud of me and were supportive of me in every way.

At A&M, I called home almost every day just to stay in touch and fill them in on my comings and goings—newsy chats about life, school, and friends. I did the same the day after the fair. I just didn’t happen to mention my new decision to become a Planned Parenthood volunteer. It’s not that I intended to keep it secret, I told myself—more that I didn’t want to worry them, because I didn’t think they would be able to understand how the work I would be doing wasn’t going to
promote
abortion, but
lessen
it.
I’ll wait until I’ve been doing it a little while,
I reasoned
, so I can give them examples of the good I’m doing there, how I’m helping women.

It wasn’t the first secret I’d kept from them.

Oddly, at the time, I didn’t consciously connect this new secret with the old one I still kept. That other secret was about a year old, buried deep, so deep I never let it rise to conscious thought. I lived as if it had never happened, as if it were just a long-ago, unimportant medical appointment that had come and gone without a trace or consequence. It wasn’t that I had strong emotions of pain that I was trying to bury. It wasn’t festering or lurking or weighing on me. In fact, I had no emotions at all about it. None. Zip. It was simply a fact—private, personal, done, and behind me. Or so I thought.

“I’m not really sure how I feel about abortion,” I’d told Jill in the Flag Room. Truer words were never spoken. I didn’t have a clue how I
felt
about abortion, and as for what I
thought
about it—well, I simply didn’t.

Though I had grown up in a church that believed in the sanctity of human life, my family had never been the type to debate the ins and outs of this stance, its meaning or consequence, around the kitchen table. But we loved God, and God created life, and people shouldn’t take life. Besides, sexual intimacy was kept for marriage, and as long as a woman honored that, she’d never find herself needing to consider an abortion, so it wasn’t a matter that I had to give much personal thought to. As a young woman living at home, precollege, I assumed I would live out these values. It really seemed that simple.

It wasn’t that simple once I was living at college.

I moved from my small town of Rockdale, with its population of about 5,000, to the home of Texas A&M, only about 55 miles away, in what is affectionately called Aggieland, the Bryan/College Station metropolitan area with a population of about 200,000 people.

Like so many other college freshmen, I enjoyed my first year living on campus at Texas A&M as an experiment in trying on a new persona. I went from superachiever good girl to party girl in a matter of months. Naturally, everything suffered—my grades as well as my choices of friends and activities. I was a classic textbook case of good girl run amok. It didn’t take my parents or me long to realize I wasn’t where I needed to be, so I transferred to a community college in Bryan, Texas, where I got a grip on my grades. That was the good news. The bad news? I fell head over heels for Mark.

Mark was eight years older than I, and our relationship quickly escalated, emotionally and physically. Mark told me he had a little boy, three-year-old Justin, by a previous marriage. But he never saw Justin, who lived in another town with his mother. In my misguided zeal to come to the rescue of this little boy who didn’t see his father, I insisted we contact Justin’s mother and begin spending time with Justin. Mark went along halfheartedly, and soon I was picking up Justin for visits. Before long, I’d bonded with Justin as if he were my own son. I became friends with his mom and his maternal grandmother. I reveled in his calling me “my other mom,” and I eagerly anticipated every visit.

My parents tried to caution me about the dangers they saw in my relationship with Mark, but I wasn’t listening. Mark and I soon got engaged, and I planned to return to Texas A&M and pursue my degree as a married woman with a part-time son.

And then I discovered I was pregnant.

I was worried, scared, and confused. I loved Mark, adored Justin, and was anticipating our life together as a family. I was also looking forward to a few more years of school followed by a meaningful career. I did my best to picture that plan with a baby to care for added into the mix, but I couldn’t see how I could make it all work. And telling my parents? I couldn’t even imagine it. In my anger over what I had perceived as their lack of support for my relationship with Mark, I already felt I’d nearly ruined our parent-daughter relationship. How could I face them? How could I shame them with the news of a pregnancy before marriage?

Mark, on the other hand, had no illusions about working a baby into our plans. His suggested solution was immediate.

Who was this Abby that I see when I revisit these memories?

I shudder now even just writing down what happened when I told him the news. “Oh, that’s no big problem,” he announced matter-of-factly. “You can just have an abortion.”

“But, Mark—I don’t know how I feel about that. I mean, I just
can’t
have a baby now. I’d have to give up school. Still—an abortion?”

“It’s easy. Really easy. I’ve had friends who’ve done it. It’s really no big deal. One appointment and the problem is solved, just like that.” Mark informed me that he knew of a clinic in Houston. How did he know of it? He’d taken a previous girlfriend there for an abortion. Now he offered to take me.

The year was 2000. I was twenty years old. Looking back, I find it hard to believe that the values I’d been raised with didn’t figure more into my decision making. The high school girl I’d been, the church I’d grown up in, and the family I’d come from—I just put them out of my mind. I’ve learned a lot since then. I’ve sat with women of all socioeconomic levels, many races and faiths, from young teen girls to middle-aged women, who have found themselves face-to-face with the same questions and choices I wrestled with.

Today’s Abby knows what that Abby did not.

But that Abby, the Abby I was then, agreed. In the space of a few days Mark and I made our plans, and I applied for my very first credit card so I could pay the five-hundred-dollar abortion fee. When the card came in the mail, I called the clinic and made the appointment. I never thought about one simple fact: there was already a baby inside of me. It was as if what I had was not a baby but simply a pregnancy—a medical condition that needed treatment to “cure” it. This pregnancy felt like the heaviest burden I’d ever had to carry—my first true crisis. I’d gotten myself into this. Now I was problem solving to get out of it. To my shame, I don’t recall any other thought process than that.

I’d never been to Houston before. The morning of the appointment, I headed southwest on Highway 6 and drove the ninety miles to Houston. Mark was the passenger, the navigator, because he’d been there before. At the clinic, Mark came in with me as I signed in, and we both sat for a brief time alongside a number of girls my age. Then Mark headed outdoors. I was instructed, along with the other women, to move into a back room for a group counseling session. We all watched a brief video that explained the procedure. I can’t remember anything about that video today, but I do recall that when it ended, the clinician laughed and said, “Oh, don’t be worried, girls.” She waved away the video as if it were of no consequence. She had a long braid, twined with beads that caught my eye as her head turned, looking us over. “I’ve had, like, nine abortions. Really, this will be over before you know it. It’s no big deal.”

Whoa. Nine? I don’t ever want to be like that,
I thought. I could tell I wasn’t the only one who thought so; several of us made eye contact with raised eyebrows and expressions of disbelief.

“We’ll call your name when it’s time to come back.” She disappeared into the hallway.

That was it. Our “counseling” was evidently over. We sat in silence and waited.

I’m fuzzy on what happened next. My next clear memory is of finding myself lying on a table, feet in stirrups, with a painful pressure steadily increasing in my abdomen. I was groaning, and the nurse was gently rubbing my forearm. “It’s okay, honey. It’s almost over.” I opened my eyes and saw a poster of a cat on the ceiling above my head. The cat was hanging from a branch, and there was a slogan written beneath its dangling feet:
Hang in there.

But then the cat moved, like it was sliding off the ceiling and onto the wall. “There’s something wrong with that picture,” I tried to say, but my tongue felt heavy and sluggish.

“You’re fine, honey. It’s just the medicine. Shhh. Relax.”

Another round of pain. I could hear myself groaning, but it sounded distant.

I became vaguely aware that the pain had stopped. I was being moved. The next thing I recall is waking up slumped forward, sitting in a hard, straight chair. I looked around me. My chair was one in a long line, filled by the girls who had watched the video with me. Some were staring at the floor, some rocking with their arms wrapped around their bellies. Some were softly crying. Others, like me, sat silently, repeatedly trying to shift their weight to find a comfortable position. I don’t recall any eye contact between us.

I’m not sure how long I sat on that uncomfortable chair, longing to lie down, but then someone was helping me stand and get dressed, right there in the line. I was handed a few crackers. “Here, eat these. Then you can go.”

I did as I was told, then walked out. Mark was waiting for me outside, nonchalant and casual. He helped me into the car, and we drove back to Bryan in silence. He dropped me off at my apartment.

The act was done. The “problem” gone. The process had been physically painful, but I had no regrets. No sadness. No struggle over whether what I’d done was right or wrong. Just a definite sense of relief:
Whew. That’s behind me. I can get on with my life now.

I slammed that experience into a box, nailed it shut, stashed it on a shelf in a dark corner of my soul, and pretended it wasn’t there. Three days later I resumed my normal activities. I told no one, not a single friend or confidante. It was a secret that only Mark and I knew, but we never spoke of it again. Not once. Several months later, we married.

Today, I wonder if one reason I was so quick, so eager to embrace Jill’s presentation about Planned Parenthood—which I heard just about twelve months after that abortion—is that it validated my own secret decision to abort. As Jill spoke, I saw myself as one of the wise and lucky ones who had control over my reproductive rights and utilized my access to safe medical procedures. Jill clearly didn’t look down on the decision to abort. She understood the crises women found themselves in. In my role at Planned Parenthood, I would be helping other women exercise their “rights” and protect their “access” as they faced their crises.

Had I never had an abortion—had I never personally bought into the thinking that if the “embryonic tissue” inside of me was simply removed, I could get on with my life and not be hindered by my “mistake”—how would I have responded to Jill’s well-crafted presentation designed to enlist college girls into the ranks of Planned Parenthood?

I’ll never know. That is one of the costs of my well-kept secret.

Once it had taken hold within me, my secret had the power to shape and influence my reasoning, my perspective, my conscience. Years later, I would discover that the box in my soul wasn’t sealed as well as I’d thought. It was releasing undetectable yet poisonous fumes that wafted through my soul in silence and contaminated my heart. Over time, this secret did to me the same thing I did in my relationship with the parents who’d given birth to me and nurtured, supported, and loved me with their whole hearts. It hid itself, just as I was now hiding my true self from my parents. The insidious power that my secret wielded in my soul was kept secret
from me.

Now that my secrets are out, their power is broken, and my vision has cleared enough to see with new eyes the road that led me to this place. It is a road worth revisiting, for here I am discovering for the first time what parts are paved with regret, remorse, or brokenness. But to my surprise there are bright spots along the way as well. I’ve encountered deep friendship and loyalty, and people of true strength. In the women I met in the Planned Parenthood clinic where I worked in Bryan, Texas—both clients and staff—I’ve seen courage and resilience. And on both sides of the fence that encircles that clinic, I’ve found compassion and community. I have also faced death threats and known the murder of a friend. I’ve been dragged into court, turned away from some churches, welcomed by others. I’ve discovered that perceived enemies were friends, and I’ve had perceived friends declare me an enemy.